


Habits

by FoxGlade



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Agender Character, Gen, Team as Family, rocket's not an animal but he's still a raccoon u feel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 08:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2144781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxGlade/pseuds/FoxGlade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rocket is newly made, fighting his way across the galaxy and going through anyone who tries to stop him, he makes a point of not washing his food.</p><p>From <a href="http://guardian-kink.livejournal.com/1806.html?thread=16910#t16910">this prompt</a> on guardian_kink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Habits

When Rocket is newly made, fighting his way across the galaxy and going through anyone who tries to stop him, he makes a point of not washing his food.

He has vague memories of trying it back There, on impulses still intact after the surgeries and the experiments. But he also has slightly clearer memories of having the food taken away from him, ice cold water thrown at him, even- anyway, he's not dumb. He knows how to learn a lesson.

So he eats whatever food he can get as it is, screw his instincts. He's not an animal. He doesn't wash his food, he doesn’t sleep curled up in a ball, he doesn’t bury the things he steals – he’s as much a person as any M-type being, and he makes sure that everyone knows it. He’s got enough to be defensive about without adding to it.

When he falls in with Groot, things are different – mostly because now he has an endearingly kind-hearted brawler of a friggin’ _talking tree_ along for the ride, but there are other things. Groot is seemingly oblivious to people talk about him, acting all… tree-y like he doesn’t even care if people call him an “it”, when they act like he can’t understand him.

“I am Groot,” he admonishes Rocket, who stands snarling at the retreating backs of the lousy pieces of _dapsen_ who thought it was fine to just yank the leaves off Groot’s shoulders. A delicate vine tugs at the gun in his paws- hands, his hands, and if it were anyone else doing the tugging, he’d show ‘em just what he could do without the gun, but as it stands he lets Groot take it with only mild complaint.

“Yeah, well, _they_ weren’t nice! Did you hear what they called you?” he demands. “I ain’t claimin’ to be an expert on Hruthin linguisticals, but even I know that pronoun is insultin’ when applied to a sentient being!”

Groot tilts his head and mumbles wordlessly, making Rocket roll his eyes.

“It’s nothin’ to do with gender, I know you don’t even have one, and that’s not the point!”

Groot shrugs and turns away, loping towards their ship without so much as an “I am Groot”, and Rocket growls in frustration before running to catch up. “Some day someone’s gonna be treatin’ you like some plain old _derrishoul_ and I ain’t gonna be there to politely correct ‘em,” he warns as he climbs up Groot’s back, perching on his shoulder and ignoring the urge to lick at his paws. Hands. Groot just shakes himself in his version of a laugh and continues onwards.

\---

So then he ends up reluctantly joining a team of _yaolins_ who want to save the galaxy or something, and he maybe helps them actually save the galaxy. But they’re not bad, for a bunch of Class 1 M-types, and they treat him and Groot alright, so he doesn’t object too strenuously to sticking around while Groot grows upwards and outwards.

And maybe he sees Peter dancing in front of Gamora with a dumbass grin on his face, and hears Drax telling stories about his daughter’s epic sixth birthday celebration, and silently helps Gamora fix one of the modified panels in her wrist after a fight. Maybe all this happens and he lets his guard down a little.

“I am Groot!” Groot squeaks when Rocket picks up his pot, carefully hefting it as he pads through the tight twists of the ventilation tunnel and heads for the main sleeping quarters.

“Don’t get all smug about it, alright?” Rocket replies.

Initially Peter had stuck to his own bedroom underneath the cockpit, but when Gamora and Drax had claimed one of the empty storage rooms near the heating system for a general sleeping room, Peter had quickly joined them. Rocket only knows this through careful observation, since apparently they weren’t talking about how they were all enthusiastically participating in some sort of cuddly sleepover every night, but hey, who was he to judge? It wasn’t like he didn’t spend his nights curled around Groot’s pot with branches and flowers tangling through his fur.

The three of them are mostly settled for the night when Rocket sneaks in, treading carefully so as not to give away his presence. It sort of works – Gamora hears, of course, but she just looks at him with calm eyes before closing them once more. Groot waves his tiny branches at the sight of Drax, who’s sleeping silently and without movement on his back on the other side of the room. Peter, in direct contrast, is sprawled in the direct centre of the place, snoring loudly. Rocket grimaces.

“No one told me the humie snores,” he mutters to Groot, but sets the pot down gently in a corner anyway. He glances at the others one more time, lingering on Gamora, who is definitely still watching them even if her eyes are closed, then licks the side of Groot’s face. Groot lets out a pleased hum and sprouts a flower.

“Don’t be gettin’ sappy, now,” Rocket warns as he curls around the pot, tail over his snout, paws- hands- _paws_ tucked neatly underneath.

“I am Groot,” Groot whispers when he’s settled, tendrils of vine stretching out and trailing over his back.

“Sappy,” Rocket repeats. “Like a damn _fit fit_ tree.”

When he wakes up, the others are stretching and quietly discussing where they’ll go next, and not one of them makes a comment on how he was sleeping.

\---

Over the next few weeks Rocket continues to test the other Guardians in small ways, even as they gallivant around the galaxy and try to keep a rapidly growing Groot in pots that fit him.

In a bar on Tarrlok III, Peter knocks half the bread platter the three of them have been sharing onto the floor with one enthusiastic gesture. Gamora rolls her eyes as loudly as physically possible (which, as it turns out, is pretty damn loud), but Rocket just jumps off his stool and snatches the pieces up, putting them back onto the bar and absently tearing one to pieces before eating it. Gamora stares.

“You got a problem?” he grunts, feeling his hackles raise in defence.

“The floor of this establishment is disgusting, I’m not ingesting anything that has touched it,” she says, nudging the plate away. Rocket opens his mouth to reply, but Peter beats him to it.

“Your loss,” he says, grabbing one of the pieces of bread and shoving it in his mouth. “Haven’t you ever heard of the three-second rule?” At both Gamora and Rocket’s blank looks, he shrugs. “Guess it’s a Terran thing.”

It’s not all bar fights and bounty hunting and running for their lives from criminals and, occasionally, the law. There’s a few days after Tarrlok III where they drift aimlessly through space, no leads to chase and no distress signals to answer. It’d be sort of relaxing, if Peter ever turned his damn wailing Terran music off, or if Drax would stop sharpening his weapons right next to Groot, or if Gamora would stop practicing her stealth skills by climbing through the vents and dropping down on anyone walking below.

Case in point: Rocket’s wandering the corridors, tossing up going back to that coil of cable in the secondary engine that Peter probably wouldn’t notice if it went missing, and heading to his room on the other end of the ship to clean out the grease matting the fur on the end of his tail. There’s no one around, this section of the ship dead quiet for once, so he compromises and sits where he is, looking around cautiously before curling his tail around and gnawing at its tip. He’s not an animal, okay, but no one can deny it’s an efficient system.

Gamora drops from the ceiling with an exaggerated “HYA!” sound, and they both freeze when they lock eyes; Gamora with her knives pointing directly at his throat, Rocket with his tail trapped between his teeth.

“Hey,” he says, voice muffled slightly through a mouthful of fur. Gamora blinks, then steps back.

“Hello,” she says. “I apologise for interrupting your grooming.”

“I’m not- you know what, it’s fine,” he says, spitting his tail out and standing. “I have to go do… something. Over there.”

“Indeed.” She sheaths her knives and walks away, not looking back, but Rocket thinks he saw something like a blush on her face before turning away. But an embarrassed blush is better than an angry flush, so even if he can’t meet Gamora’s eyes at the meet the team has later that night, at least he knows that it’s because she thinks she walked in on something private, rather than because she thinks he’s a filthy animal.

Days later, during a fight in a bar that looks exactly like the bar on Tarrlok III except three systems over, someone tries to touch Groot as he tentatively walks back and forth along their table on tiny, newly-grown legs, and Rocket doesn’t hesitate to bite the idiot’s hand. Drax’s booming laugh almost drowns out the idiot’s shriek.

“Well played, small mammal!” Drax says, grinning. “They certainly did not expect such an attack!”

“I don’t make a habit of it,” Rocket mutters. He spits the blood onto the floor rather than swallow it – he’s tough and uncultured, but he’s not an animal. Besides, Gedd blood tastes like shit.

“A warrior makes use of all weapons available,” Drax replies. “Your teeth are sharp. It would be unwise to neglect them in battle.”

“I am Groot,” Groot butts in, and Rocket flicks at him with a claw. Finger. Fuck it, it’s a claw, and he knows it.

“No one asked your opinion,” he says, and ignores Groot’s sad groan.

When he’s helping repair a heating component in the belly of the ship a week later, digging through the wiring and ignoring Peter’s warnings about what he’ll do if Rocket even _thinks_ of nabbing any of it for his bombs, he remembers the incident and hesitates, then pushes himself out from under the panel.

“Screwdriver’s useless, it’s too big,” he says, and flings it at Peter. Peter shouts something that he ignores again, and he steels himself before licking his paws thoroughly.

“Uhh… did you get grease on your hands or something?” Peter asks, rubbing his head.

“They’re more sensitive when they’re wet,” Rocket mutters. He examines his claws – still sharp.

“Yeah, hey, I know something else that’s- wait, what?”

He’s already squirming back into the tight space underneath the panels and reaching for the wires. “I got the best hands in the business, Quill,” he calls, “and that’s ‘cause they’re paws.”

There’s a long silence, and Rocket doesn’t think about anything except the wiring in front of him, and the schematics and diagrams in his mind that tell him where to put what. “Makes sense, I guess,” Peter says eventually. “Just don’t electrocute yourself, alright? I did that once, and lemme tell you, it smelt like fried pigeonrat in here for weeks.”

“Like you’ve ever had any food so nice as pigeonrat on this thing,” Rocket shouts back, and definitely does not grin to himself.

When they eat on the ship, all together in one room in something that Peter insists is “family bonding time”, Rocket gets into the habit of watering Groot at the table, because if they’re gonna do this then they’re gonna do it right. That night, Rocket takes a bowl of water to the table rather than the usual mug, and gives Groot about half of it. Then, pointedly not looking at the others, he starts tearing his own dinner into chunks and dunking them into the water before eating them.

He can hear the others go silent around him and he doesn’t look up. “Food not clean enough for you, buddy?” Peter asks. “I mean, it’s probably not clean enough for any of us, really.”

“That is comforting to know,” Gamora says with a frown.

“But you never had a problem with it before,” Peter continues. Rocket finally risks a glance up.

They look… curious. Well, Peter looks curious. Gamora just looks kinda pissed at Peter now, and Drax is still steadily chewing through his portion, looking like he wouldn’t care if Rocket got up and started dancing on the table. But none of them look like they’re gonna snatch his food away, or throw the bowl of water on him, or hold his face down in it. So he shrugs.

“Just a habit,” he says. The others nod and go back to their conversations without so much as a second glance his way. It’s… nice.

“I am Groot,” Groot says in a small voice. Rocket nudges him.

“No one likes an ‘I told you so’ guy,” he replies through a mouthful of meat.

“I am Grooooot.”

“Yeah, yeah. You big sap.”

**Author's Note:**

> so i saw gotg and i cried hysterically and my friends made fun of me for 84 years. because i am a trashbaby, i immediately felt the intense need to write fic about it, and now i can't even blame shena for this. go me.
> 
> "M-type being" is a galaxy-wide term for "humanoid" that i just made up because c'mon guys, why would non-humans say "humanoid". i used he/him/his pronouns for groot because, as someone pointed out, groot is fully capable of correcting rocket on pronoun usage, and rocket wouldnt be a dick about that anyway. and besides, many agender people use she or he pronouns, so.
> 
> also, the alien language words in italics are all taken from the book series animorphs. if you recognised them, i hope you appreciated it and/or laughed about it.
> 
> (oh, and if anyone cares, the last thing groot said was, "It's nice to have a family." so, rocket was right; he IS a big sap)


End file.
